Notes on Toxic Afterlives

Essay on shorts collection shorts 1
Screened during FIELD RECORDINGS 5
Autor Kris dittel
Published November 8, 2024

Where to go after the world has ended? What happens after its event has taken place? What are the worlds that have already ended and what forms of life emerge from the intimacy of living with and through the catastrophe? These are some of the questions that emerge in the selection of short films that came to be referred together as “toxic landscapes”. In them, the world has already ended, or at least, for some.

Karla Crnčević’s Wild Flowers

I’m watching and responding to these short films from the port city of Rotterdam, safe from war, where direct effects of the climate change can still be felt only in the form of an exceptionally warm autumn; we are reassured, against all logic, that the rising sea levels will remain safe for this city in the future. The four films tell stories where a man-made cataclysmic shift has already taken place. And against all odds, in the aftermath of disasters, they are stories about afterlives, the insistence of life, and at times beauty too. Thinking of beauty in the face of destruction, war and colonial injustice presents an uneasy dilemma. A ruin of the world, when viewed from a historically or contextually distant perspective, can devolve into an aesthetic fetish, but that is not the kind of beauty that is at stake here.

The allure of the image is intoxicating. In Priyageetha Dia’s LAMENT H.E.A.T, a long shot reveals a forest gradually engulfed in smoke. The accelerating blaze and rising smoke create a sensational image of the ruby sky, accompanied by the increasing rhythm of drumming. The sight of the incinerating trees is entrancing, unsettlingly so.

At first, I’m bothered by the fast, mechanical moves of the camera, until I see a drone appear above the blazing forest, as in a self-aware revelation. It rotates and fixes its piercing mechanical gaze on me, the viewer, sharing a conspiratorial wink. I understand that it is the drone that has granted me this synthetic vision, but I cannot shrug off my recognition of it as an angel. Unlike the angel of history that surrendered to the forces of the storm, i.e. progress, his angel asks, Whose progress? What history?

“Everything on Earth is dying,” decries the grief song, but as “The green wilderness is blazing, Even if the wildlife fades, Your scent will not part me. It will not part me.” It leaves me caught in this duality of emotion, a sense of mourning, and the memory transcending the chaos and passage of time.

Still from Priyageetha Dia’s LAMENT H.E.A.T
“Look, if you think you’ve captured a nuclear power station, I’m afraid I must gravely disappoint you” recalls the man of his confrontation with the occupying Russian soldiers. And while the Russians refer to the place as their “sanatorium”, a medical facility for healing, there's no reasonable logic to be found behind occupying a radioactive wasteland. The backdrop of this film, Oleksiy Radynski’s Chornobyl 22, is the temporary occupation of the former nuclear plant by Russian military forces in February 2022.
There’s nothing to be gained in Chornobyl, at least for humans. Estimates vary, but most agree that the site won’t be suitable for human habitation for at least the next 20,000 years, referring to the half-life of Plutonium-239, which contaminates the central portion of the Zone. Twenty thousand years. T-w-e-n-t-y t-h-o-u-s-a-n-d years is an unfathomable, abstract span of time compared to a human life. And while multiple proposals have been drawn up for the revitalisation of the site, such as the recent plans for resettlement in the affected Belarusian territory, in today’s popular imagination Chornobyl represents a spectral ruin, which was also declared a tourist attraction in 2011. Simultaneously, the effects of the disaster continue to haunt human lives in the presence of radiation in the soil and water. The radiation released from Chornobyl embodies a multitude of hauntings, past, present and future; protracted violence enacted on human life, on those who have suffered, suffer and will suffer its consequences.

At the same time, reports of a thriving mammal population and flourishing fauna in the exclusion site have emerged. I’m reading about microorganisms that have adapted and even prospered in the afterlife of the disaster, in extreme radioactive conditions: mutant bacteria that are resistant to damage, the activation of soil through micromycetes, the fungus that thrives in Chornobyl’s contaminated zone. There’s even radiotrophic fungi growing on the reactor’s walls, using radiation as an energy source to drive its metabolism.

I think of the scene in the film showing stray dogs sniffing the ground as Russian military vehicles pass by, “anti-aircraft gun, munition, armoured vehicle,” identified by another man filming. Well-fed foxes roam the area, and we spot the sign indicating the Red Forest, trees of which turned red immediately after the nuclear explosion; soon after, all of the trees died. Today it appears just like any other pine forest. As we learn from the narrator, the Russian army assessed the amount of radiation as "safe" and, as a result, exposed soldiers to levels hazardous for human life. The narrators of the film are engineers, technicians, and security personnel who remain near the former nuclear reactor. Many of them altruistically refer to their duty to protect and safeguard the site, but I cannot stop thinking about the radiation levels they are themselves exposed to.

These images of Chornobyl convey both timescales: the human lifespan within the radioactive present and the cosmic time of the radiative half-life of plutonium. Heather Davis writes about plastic as a substance that “cracks time.” In her conception, plastic provides a vector from the deep, geological past as transmogrification of long-dead, once living organisms (oil), to the distant future, a petrocapitalist dystopia, and the ongoing climate catastrophe. Similarly, Chornobyl’s multiple temporalities “crack” the unison of life’s definition: while it serves as a zone for toxic recreation, a sanatorium with a death sentence, for microorganisms like bacteria and fungi, it is a site of transformation.

Still From Oleksiy Radynski’s Chornobyl 22
Multiple temporalities converge at the former nuclear test site in the Algerian Sahara too, where atomic time, prehistoric time, and the toxicity of the present collide. And still, it remains, by Arwa Aburawa & Turab Shah, opens with images of stone carvings, testaments to a human civilisation which existed from 4.000–6.000 BC, when, as the narrator explains, “everything was green here.” In the collective memory, migration has always been integral to how people arrived at and inhabited this place, up until the French colonial occupation.

In contrast to the film’s slow, meditative shots of landscapes and children at play, stand the consequences of France’s nuclear testing in the desert, carried out between 1960 and 1966, during and following the Algerian Revolution and persisting into its independence. The effects of the testing persist to this day, impacting human and non-human lives alike. “We lost crops, we lost animals, we lost trees, we lost wild animals,” recalls the voiceover, telling stories of people who died as a result of radiation. The testimony of witnesses and victims of the nuclear testing site speaks of the impossibility of a restoration and separation from what has happened there. The radiation is in the water, in the land, and embedded in people’s memory across generations.

In her book Colonial Toxicity: Rehearsing French Radioactive Architecture and Landscape in the Sahara (2024) Samia Henni distinguishes between the use of the word “radioactivity” and “toxicity”, the former being used in the official documents of French military archives. And I want to think with Henni here, how each term suggests a material condition and its effects in different ways, where “radioactivity”, in her reading, steers attention away from the contamination of human and nonhuman lives, but is also an ever-present condition. During her research she felt that “Everything I was seeing and reading was toxic, […] the fact that we cannot access the archives is likewise toxic.” Toxicity here takes on another layer of meaning, of a harmful social-cultural attitude, also in regard to the fact that archives containing information about contamination and pollution following the nuclear weapon testing remain classified by the French government.

“Nobody could end it or separate it from us, except God’s will” the film’s narrator states. Indeed, the effects of colonial toxicity cannot be regulated, forgotten, or contained, as shown by the recent incident in which sand with nuclear remnants from the Algerian Sahara was carried by the wind back to France.

Still from Arwa Aburawa & Turab Shah‘s And still, it remains
While the inhabitants of the desert were never freed from the afterimage of destruction, in Karla Crnčević’s Wild Flowers, recollection takes on a different role. The story can be read as one of mis-remembering, a gap that opens between memory and documentation, but it is also an account of the insistence on the hope for life. In the short film, the directors’ parents narrate their memory of footage shot upon returning to their village in Croatia at the end of the war in former Yugoslavia. Soon the narration and the documentation on the tape start to diverge and discrepancies occur. Yet, against the treachery of memory, one image prevails, detailed by Crnčević’s mother: “I was expecting the horror and darkness, but at one point I saw a garden full of orange flowers! And they had such a beautiful colour!” And although there is no way to return to how it once was, the images of blooming flowers stand as quiet reminders of life persisting, a glimmer of possibility.

The four films testify to the many ways warfare, colonisation and ecology are closely linked, the effects of which are felt in the present and extend into the distant future. These effects are already altering, and will continue to alter countless lives, particularly in a context where
their impact is unevenly distributed. And for clarity, this uneven distribution means the disparity of suffering and death in the face of the climate catastrophe. Yet, there’s a daring suggestiveness, an insistence, a desire for justice and life.

References 
1 https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-security/safety-of-plants/chernobyl-acci- target="_blank">https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-security/safety-of-plants/chernobyl-acci- target="_blank">https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-security/safety-of-plants/chernobyl-acci-
dent#chernobyl-today
2 https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Global-News/2016/0424/Chernobyl-will-be-unhabitable-for-at-
least-3-000-years-say-nuclear-experts
3 https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-security/safety-of-plants/chernobyl-acci-
dent#progressive-closure-of-the-chernobyl-plant
4 https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-security/safety-of-plants/chernobyl-acci-
dent#Ref_8
5 https://nyaspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1749-6632.2009.04830.x
6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Waste_management
7 Heather Davis in an interview with Kris Dittel and Clementine Edwards in The Material Kinship Reader
(Onomatopee 2022), pp. 260–262.
8 https://framerframed.nl/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/critiquedart-colonial-toxicity-114527.pdf

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